The Triumph of the Cross, Viewed Through the Stigmata

National Catholic Register, 14 September 2024

We commemorate the Crucifixion on Good Friday, but on Sept. 14 the cross itself is praised.

Eight hundred years ago, around the feast of the Triumph of the Cross (Sept. 14), Francis of Assisi received the “stigmata,” the five wounds of Jesus in his own body. He bore the wounds until his death in 1226, two years later. The Franciscans mark the feast of the stigmata on Sept. 17.

St. Francis received the stigmata at La Verna, where the Franciscans maintain a shrine today, just nine months after he created the first Nativity scene at Greccio. The Franciscans celebrated the 800th anniversary of that last Christmas.

“At Christmas 1223 Francis wanted to represent the Nativity scene to see with the eyes of the body the love of God incarnate in the Child,” said Franciscan Father Livio Crisci, provincial minister of the Order of Friars Minor of Tuscany, who have custody of the sanctuary of La Verna. “In September 1224 he wanted to feel a little of that pain that Christ suffered on the cross to save humanity. From Bethlehem to Calvary is the itinerary that, as Franciscans, we are preparing to take to celebrate this event, after eight centuries since the first Nativity scene, eight centuries since that prodigious event when the impression of the stigmata was formed on the body of the Poverello of Assisi.”

The feast of the Triumph of the Cross expresses the meaning of the stigmata. We commemorate the Crucifixion on Good Friday, and that singular sacrifice is offered to the Father at every Holy Mass. But on Sept. 14 the cross itself is praised. The very instrument of horror is made holy. The tree from which the serpent brought death in Eden is conquered by the tree of Calvary, the wood upon which hung the Savior of the world.

The gift of the stigmata — a blessed burden in extremis — honors the wounds resulting from Jesus being fastened to the cross. In choosing to keep the stigmata after the Resurrection, Jesus transformed the painful wounds into marks of glory. The great Charles Wesley hymn about the Second Coming, Lo He Comes With Clouds Descending, puts it magnificently:

“Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body bears, cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshippers: with what rapture … gaze we on those glorious scars!”

We get the Latin word stigmata from St. Paul in Galatians 6:17, “I bear on my body the brand marks [‘stigmata’] of Jesus.” While it is possible that Paul the Apostle had the stigmata, the traditional interpretation of that verse is that he was referring to his various beatings and imprisonments.

The phenomenon of the stigmata remains extraordinary, but we are not quite so shocked by it as the contemporaries of Francis would have been. There have been a number of stigmatics in recent centuries. Pope Francis canonized a 20th-century Indian stigmatic, Mariam Thresia, in 2019. And the most famous Franciscan of the 20th century, Padre Pio, bore the stigmata for most of his life. So famous was Padre Pio that the stigmata itself became well-known and likely thought more common than it is. But St. Francis was the first recorded case; in 1224, it was something entirely new.

St. Bonaventure wrote an account in his Life of St. Francis. He was born around the time Francis received the stigmata. He wrote this about Francis in prayer at La Verna:

“His unquenchable fire of love for the good Jesus was fanned into such a blaze of flames that so many waters could not quench so powerful a love (Song of Songs 8:6-7). While Francis was praying on the mountainside, he saw a Seraph with six fiery and shining wings descend from the height of heaven. And when in swift flight the Seraph had reached a spot in the air near the man of God, there appeared between the wings the figure of a man crucified, with his hands and feet extended in the form of a cross and fastened to a cross. Two of the wings were lifted above his head, two were extended for flight and two covered his whole body. When the vision disappeared, Francis was left with the stigmata.”

As a young man Francis stripped himself of his wealthy father’s garments, a sign of his renouncing the comfortable life into which he had been born. The stigmata toward the end of his life seemed to complete that; not only would he be stripped as Jesus was, but he would be nailed too. The most literal of saints — who first understand the command to “repair my church” as a building restoration project — would literally be conformed to Christ Crucified and bear those marks, the stigmata, in his body.

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